Organizing Passion

The 246 Poems of John of Grimestone’s Book, MS Edin. NLS Adv. 18.7.21

This paper was to be given at the 2012 New Chaucer Society Congress in Portland, Oregon, but sadly I was not able to attend. The proposal is given below.

My paper will close-read the material and literary forms of Friar John of Grimestone’s commonplace book and consider what John’s copying practices tell us about the collection and collocation of vernacular English poetry in the late fourteenth century. A glance inside the book reveals that John uses double- and single-column layouts, rubrication, tail-rhyme braces, marginal lists, and an index to arrange 246 English poems with Latin verses and Latin and French sermon material. These material forms prompt me to ask the following questions: how does the ordinatio of John’s book suggest a taxonomic scheme, a theory of poetry, or a theory of how poetry informs and is informed by sermons? How does John’s apparently commonplace book, compiled around 1372, compare with fourteenth-century professionally compiled manuscripts, such as Auchinleck or Harley 2253? In general, how do John’s scribal practices allow us to continue the conversation about the relationship between bookish and poetic form at the end of the fourteenth century?

It has been almost 40 years now since Edward Wilson provided a descriptive index of John’s lyrics, and 25 years since Siegfried Wenzel delineated the categories and kinds of verses John transcribes and translates, verses which embody an affective theology by addressing Christ’s passion and wordly bliss. Both Wilson’s and Wenzel’s approaches to the lyrics consider them as abstract religious and literary texts. This paper will continue the exploration of John of Grimestone’s devotional and didactic practices, while using bibliographic and formal literary methods in order to consider the functions of devotional English poetry compilation in the late fourteenth century.

Paper Panel: Reading Scribes and Scribal Readings
Organizer: Aditi Nafde